Greg,
nice explanation; you provided a background to some things that
until now were only a hunch for me.
Greg Troxel wrote:
I can certainly see the point of avoiding free-as-in-beer services with
non-free-as-in-speech toolsets and changeable procedures. But I think
that's orthogonal to tool choice, and OSM seems to have resources to
host a VC server.
It seems to me that github is offering a lot of "cool" things that you
don't get with free software, thus creating a natural pull of people
towards github. I have also heard - but this may be a misunderstanding
on my part - that while you can commit to a github-hosted project
without having a github account, your commits will be somewhat inferior
to others (will not show up as nicely in timelines etc. that github
generates) which would also create a social pressure for people to join
github to participate in a certain project.
OSM already has a git repository but this is currently only used for the
rails port - where I have to admit it makes some sense, as the rails
port software happens to be more controlled than other stuff in that the
admins must closely watch what gets deployed on our main servers.
You are conflating two separate things, which is the nature/capabilities
of the tool itself and the cultural norms that typically are associated
with the tools.
I think that hits the nail on the head - everytime you meet a git
enthusiast they will tell you that everyone having their personal repo
at god-knows-where is the best thing since sliced bread; and indeed...
The key question, as with svn or anything
else, is who is allowed to make changes to the official repo. With git,
integrating work done by those not on the list is easier, which may tend
to have people chooes to make the authorized committer set smaller.
... as I explained in another mail to Stefan, it always seemed to me
that the git world is more control-freakish which probably stems from
what you say above; if you can tell every would-be commiter to use his
private repo then you can afford to be.
One of the things that I found on my project was that some people who
were used to git said "every person should have a public repo on the
server". I said that I didn't want that, and no one was able to come up
with a good reason for per-person repos, because the real motivation to
have a personal one is that you aren't allowed to write the official
repo.
So maybe there *is* a way to have the best of both worlds yet.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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